No pi stock anywhere and delivery times out to end 2023!

The Japanese would take back their half of Sakhalin.

As the EU will discover.

The point about a second strike is that you can't take it out no matter how large a first strike. A lot of effort went into making sure that a nuclear war was unwinnable during the cold war, the remnants still exist.

The all out nuclear war scenario isn't one or two bombs or even ten or twenty it is thousands - the whole point is that it is too insane for anyone to start it.

Not *that* many thousands, and there is plenty of doubt that Russia especially has enough fissile material undecayed in old warheads to go bang. Nuclear warheads have a sell by date. Although plutonium SHOULD last the pace...

There is a lot of doubt as to how many warheads Russia ever had as well, since te main point of having nukes is to deter anyone else using them on you. That just takes a successful test or two and some cardboard missiles in the red square parades.

We are discovering that when it comes to their military capabilities, Russia is simply full of s*it.

The only real use of nuclear weapon is as a deterrent, and as neutron bombs with high radiation to blast ratios. So you kill people but leave the valuable infrastructure intact. The genocide bomb.

On a sunny day (18 May 2022 13:26:15 GMT) it happened TimS snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

EU is hardly an emipre, more a US slave area.

Once EU has its own army and dances to its own tune .. Anyways you Brits must regret leaving it by now.

? ;-)

They would seem to have had quite a lot, certainly up to the point when

I strongly suspect that's because a lot of top brass, along with the owners of their armament factories charged top rouble for kit (as do all the NATO kit suppliers too) while delivering cheap, untested stuff and pocketing the difference.

Take a look at Roscosmos:

- not doing much more than contracted minimums

- using worn-out kit made by sloppy workers (think of the 2mm drill-hole in Soyuz MS-09)

- the earlier mission to ISS that aborted when barely out of the atmosphere

- the fate of Buran (one uncrewed launch in 1998 and then destroyed when its hangar collapsed in 2002

- the huge salary that Dmitry Rogozin awarded himself recently When you consider the lamentable state of the feared Russian tanks and the unprofessional behaviour of their army in Ukraine, why should you expect Russian nukes and detection systems to be in any better operational state?

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the best-maintained MIG fighters and their best-trained crews belong to India and the eastern NATO countries.

Don't forget that the Russian Army and Navy are 66% conscripted? Add in the short conscription period (12 months) from induction to discharge, bad treatment by the regulars and poor pay, is it any surprise their morale is low and they neither know nor care about the rules of war, i.e. not killing civilians, looting, etc, etc.

-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org

It is Covid and the risks of globalisation that expose the stupidity of Brexit, not Ukraine. We need to have supply/production located in a stable area, under our control. That only really works for a very large economic (and necessarily political) area.

The UK was stupid, but also the EU should have been more accommodating of UK concerns, to keep them on board. The UK/EU should have been more accommodating of Russian concerns to try and get them onboard (eventually).

I'd rate it better than that, most of the initiatives on curbing the excesses of rampant capitalism seem to be coming from the EU for a start.

What the EU isn't is a state or nation. Perhaps yet should be added to the previous sentence.

It will be a lot closer to being a state/nation/...

The interesting thing about the EU having an army (generalise to military) comes if that replaces the nations in the EU having armies because that really does make war between the nations of the EU impossible which was the original overarching goal. It would be a big ask, but then so was the Euro.

Couldn't say, I decamped to Ireland a long time ago and I'm not going back.

Why?

I was generally pro the EU concept until I saw it closer up and could also see what a bureaucratic mess it is. And that happened around 20 years ago. Nothing has happened since to make me change my mind. The way that van der leyen became president of the Commission with no competition, no input from the populace, was a good example. Done more or less the way that the Chinese do it.

Then you have their generally uncooperative manner towards our leaving and behaviour since we left, too. Sulking like children deprived of their toys.

Some do, mainly the professional classes, but many of those who voted for brexit are still saying 'Bring it on: we want to re-negotiate a PROPER brexit', the Scots are saying 'forget the United Kingdom: we want out' while the DUP (Northern Ireland) are just saying NO to everything because of the Northern Ireland Agreement which they hate.

Its quite likely that Boris will be slung out sooner rather then later, but that will be because of his 'laws apply to little people, not to me' attitude and his inability to see what's wrong with the Northern Ireland agreement that he pushed through.

And the reason for that is that there is now one less trough for them to put their snouts into. A well-funded trough, too, with next to no democratic oversight.

Hmm as I recall it the UK had a large collection of special arrangements attached to their EU membership.

Have you seen the British civil service up close ? Most of what people see as the EU and when they talk about "being ruled from Brussels by faceless Eurocrats" is the civil service - those things are bureaucratic messes by definition and have been since Hammurabi.

Why ? She's a civil servant not an elected representative. The elected representatives could kick her out if they wished to, along with the whole commission. So who elected the head of HMRC ? Who can kick them out ?

For the most part the EU has just got on with its own business since the UK left. Of course most of us have pretty much stopped buying stuff from the UK because of the duties and taxes but that's to be expected since making internal trade smooth is part of what the EU is about and it works well.

As for the uncooperative attitude towards the UK leaving. The negotiations were an endless stream of the UK wanting to have the cake and eat it and the EU pointing out why they couldn't - as in the four freedoms are inseparable.

Then there is the whole ongoing fiasco that emerges from Boris Johnson promising the DUP (who had him by the short and^W^Wvotes) that there would be no customs checks in the Irish sea *and* promising the EU and Ireland that there would be no hard border on the island of Ireland ignoring the simple fact that there have to be customs checks *somewhere* as soon as the UK is not in the single market. So of course as soon as the DUP lost their grip on him they went in the only place they could be implemented (there are many buildings and farms straddling the land border) and the DUP threw the toys out of the pram leaving Northern Ireland without a government.

The EU aren't the ones trying to change the deal after its been signed and they find they don't like the taste. That's the UK and now when they were told that the EU wasn't about to renegotiate a deal that had taken so long to close and been signed by all concerned the UK response is to say "We'll do what we want without negotiating then" which is likely to be a treaty breach and a matter of international law.

As for sulking about lost toys - there's been almost no impact from the UK leaving any that there was is drowned in the noise of the pandemic impact. If it weren't for the DUP messing up the government of Northern Ireland nobody in the EU would be paying any attention to the UK apart from enjoying the antics of the Royal Family.

A large collection? Do you mean the rebate? Perhaps, but to a certain extent that was a sticking plaster for EU policy flaws. Many of the referendum Brexit voter's concerns, were common EU concerns. Border immigration control, for instance.

If the EU had sought sensible reform, it is possible that it could have kept Britain and strengthened itself. After the referendum, I had hoped Macron might step up with a vision that would suit everyone. But he was just another all mouth and no trousers reformer, like Blair.

The EU clearly needs stronger political integration. The Greek crisis was a clear indication of that. The EU needs to be able to enforce sensible member state national budgetary policy, and should give proper aid to floundering regions.

And now, today, we have Hungry looking for a bribe, to help push through the EU's (stupid) plans to divest from Russian oil. Similarly, (NATO not EU), Turkey is doing the same with a threat to block Sweden and Finland from joining NATO.

The EU needs to become a proper political entity in its own right.

The head of HMRC doesn't initiate legislation, that's the difference. All EU legislation starts at the Commission. It's not the business of civil servants to initiate legislation, directly elected politicians should be doing that.

It continues to be my opinion that the EU, as the latest attempt to "unify" Europe over the heads of the populace, will end in tears, just as previous attempts have.

Re: Re: No pi stock anywhere and delivery times out to end 2023! By: Ahem A Rivet's Shot to TimS on Thu May 19 2022 07:29 am

In the end of the day, ideology is a combination of a set of goals and the plans to achieve them. I certainly want people who takes decisions to be ideological.

Besides, letting non-elected officers do the ruling is something I often see and it is never pretty. It often happens when the administration knows there must be a reglament for something, but does not want to bother, so they enact a law which reads "[...] and the rules regarding this matter will be published by Agency XYZ". When the agency is a branch of the military you are granted that the rules will swing one way and another every time the head honcho of the agency changes as new officers are promoted into leadership and old ones are moved to other agencies.

Re: Re: No pi stock anywhere and delivery times out to end 2023! By: Ahem A Rivet's Shot to TimS on Thu May 19 2022 07:29 am

I beg to differ. Nobody I know in real life considers themselves European over Spanish, and none of them would have Spain be a State in a confederative/federative arrangement.

That's a matter of opinion, is it better to have the legislation drafted by professionals who consider practical matters first or politicians who consider ideology first ? Either way it's the directly elected representatives who decide on it.

The previous attempts were at the point of the sword (recently gun) this one is at the point of the pen and you know what is said about pens and swords.

Oh and quite a lot of the populace are generally happy about the idea of unifying Europe, some even think of themselves as European first and their nationality second. There are also people who want the bad old days of "my country first" back - that's retrograde and most know it but it can be a seductive call.

The EU approach looks like the best (only) path open towards the dissolution of nations which is something we really need to achieve., the world is too small and the toys are too dangerous for nations who all too often act like spoiled three year old children.

Ditching it over trivia is throwing the babies out with the bathwater. Making it better starts with thinking of the EU as "us" not "them".

On a sunny day (Wed, 18 May 2022 18:37:02 +0100) it happened Pancho snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com wrote in <t63aru$psh$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yes, its easier to win somebody over if you offer them something nice, threats and guns do not work so well. That is how the old USSR fell, Reagan played it beautifully without a shot fired.